Wheat long has been recognized to be an important crop, and is grown as a staple food crop in many parts of the world. This plant is grown primarily for the seed produced, although other parts of the plant have some commercial value. The seeds may be used for planting or as a source of food for human or livestock consumption.
Modern agriculture practices are increasingly taking advantage of herbicides to eliminate unwanted weeds from wheat fields and to minimize the expense of tilling fields to remove unwanted weeds. Presently, there are a limited number of marginally effective herbicides to kill unwanted plants on contact (post-emergent herbicides) that can be used in wheat without excessive crop injury. Such herbicides heretofore proposed for use with wheat have tended to be rather costly and are selective in their activity with the killing of only certain weeds.
The herbicide, glyphosate, is recognized to be an effective non-selective post-emergent herbicide. Plant transformation/genetic engineering has been used to modify other species of crop plants to incorporate resistance to the herbicidal effects of glyphosate. This method could also be used to modify wheat plants. Such genetic engineering/plant transformation involves the incorporation of a gene for herbicide resistance into the chromosome of the plant. Such procedures require special expertise and commonly are costly and as yet genetically-engineered glyphosate tolerant wheat plants are not commercially available. The resistance gene is part of a construct that is placed in the plant to impart resistance. In addition, the construct contains promoters that are responsible for activating the gene in select portions or in all parts of the plant. The presence or absence of these promoters is used to determine if the plant is the result of genetic engineering/plant transformation. The gene construct that is in commercially available crop plants includes the promoters, CaMV35S, enhanced CaMV35S, rice actin 1 promoter, 4-AS 1 (single CaMV35S plus four repeats of activating sequence), PCSLV, FMV35S, and NOS. Representative prior publications that concern the use of genetic engineering to produce such herbicide resistance include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,971,908; 5,145,783; 5,312,910; 5,352,605; 5,530,196; 5,858,742; 6,248,876; and 6,225,114.
Naturally-occurring herbicide resistance in cotton plants is discussed in Applicant's copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/782,191, filed Feb. 14, 2001 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,639,124, granted Oct. 28, 2003), and naturally-occurring herbicide resistance in soybean plants is discussed in Applicant's copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/119,194, filed Apr. 10, 2002 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,927,319, granted Aug. 9, 2005).
It is an objective of the present invention is to provide a new route for providing genetically-controlled herbicide resistance in wheat plants in the absence of genetic engineering involving the insertion of a foreign gene into the wheat plants.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a wheat seed capable of forming a wheat plant having genetically-controlled glyphosate herbicide resistance that is not attributable to genetic engineering involving the insertion of a foreign gene into the wheat plants.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a wheat plant having genetically-controlled glyphosate herbicide resistance that is not attributable to genetic engineering involving the insertion of a foreign gene into the wheat plants.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a new isolated nucleic acid encoding for a protein which when expressed causes glyphosate herbicide resistance that is naturally-occurring in wheat.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an isolated nucleic acid comprising the ngw1ngw1 and ngw2ngw2 genes selected from ‘W2-4’ wheat having ATCC Accession No. PTA-5752 which causes a wheat plant to be glyphosate herbicide resistant, as well as to provide a vector and plant cell comprising the same.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a wheat plant having genetically-controlled glyphosate herbicide resistance that can be sprayed with a herbicide during all phases of the life cycle of the plant without any substantial harm.
These and other objects, as well as the scope, nature and utilization of the claimed invention will be apparent to those skilled in this area of technology from the following detailed description and appended claims.